With no ransom demand arriving and Daniels suspecting that the matter is not financially motivated but centred around someone intent on destroying Finch, she is forced to look at his connections to her boss.
The body is identified that of Amy Grainger, another Durham student who seems to have paid a high price for simply bearing a likeness to Jessica Finch, although that is naturally of little consolation to her shattered parents. However she is shocked by his declaration that it is not Jessica’s body, but that the girl is wearing Jessica’s precious Cartier necklace and the clothes that Jessica was last seen in… and it is the uncanny likeness of this girl to Jessica that chills the team to the very core and forces them to reassess just what a depraved predator they are faced with. Suspecting that this is her victim and on the basis of the description, Daniels takes Finch to identify the girl. Wealthy entrepreneur and aforementioned golf crony, Adam Finch, has received a poisonous missive threatening his daughter, Jessica, a medical student at Durham University and he has subsequently been unable to locate her. Before she can even get a handle on mounting the investigation, her superior, Detective Chief Superintendent Bright calls in a favour for one of his golfing pals. The remote surroundings, lack of forensics and obvious futility of conducting a house-to-house in such a location leave Daniels and her team facing an uphill struggle to make headway.
The harrowing discovery of a young woman's body lying at the base of Hadrian’s Wall dressed up for a night on the town and wearing five-inch heels is Daniels first priority and the post-mortem confirms her worst fears that the girl has been tossed from a great height and sickeningly died on impact. Settled Blood gets off to a flying start and throws a recently back to work, DCI Kate Daniels, straight back into her demanding role heading up the murder investigation team in Northumbria.
Starting with the second novel in the series may be seen as sub-optimal but for any decent long running series, despite an overarching storyline following the main character's lives, each novel effectively works in isolation and this is very much the case here and hence reading the first in the series is by no means a necessity. After being throughly impressed by Mari Hannah’s recent thriller, The Silent Room, I have belatedly arrived at her highly acclaimed police procedural series featuring DCI Kate Daniels and the Murder Investigation Team of Northumbria Police.
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